Changing Temporalities of Power and the State

The early modern state has been framed along the narrative of an entity persisting in a temporal condition formally attributed to angels (aevum) and therefore both in opposition to finite beings and the eternal present of god (see Kantorowicz 1997). Not so long ago, scholars of International Relations have emphasized not only the double temporal nature of the state, constituting a linear narrative of progress on the inside, while being confronted with an eternal cycle of emergence, rise and decline towards the outside of an international state system structured through anarchy, but also fundamental role of processes of state formation in the context of temporal standardization, homogenization and rationalization (see Walker 1991, Stockdale 2013, Hom 2010, see also Gross 1985, Tilly 1994). Therefore, social temporal structures long seemed anchored in a horizon of development being fundamentally connected to the rise and persistence of the modern state. Currently this dominant way of framing has somehow lost appeal, the late modern state being confronted not only with dynamics of global capital and supranational structures of multi-level-governance, but also with theoretical attempts of questioning its political relevance besides its status as an object of knowledge (see Willke 1983, Abrams 1977, Harvey 1990). Nevertheless, in opposition to apocalyptic descriptions of a current „withering away of the state”, what we are confronted with, so the argument of the paper goes, are examples of transformations of stateness that correspond to fundamental changes of social time relations, which both have important effects on processes of temporal subjectivation. Therefore, I assume that current transformations of the state must be understood in the context of transformations of modern regimes of temporality, both related to the role of state in time but also to the government of fundamental structures of temporal belongings.